Mobile Tech & Gadgets Archives - Page 403 of 1391

Apple has found a way to win in the AI era without having the best AI: be the door

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

Apple has just done something that was unthinkable until recently: publicly admit that you don’t have the best AI. That after fifteen years of trying to make Siri work, with the advantage of hitting first, he gives up. That the brains of Apple Intelligence, including the new Siri, Google will put it. And yet, it has just gained momentum to preserve its dominant position for the next decade. A technological paradox. This isn’t a move Apple should be very proud of, but it has a nicer side: in the age of AI, being the best may not be so important. What matters is being the door. For half a century, the value in technology has been in innovation. IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook… they were all winning by creating something that no one else had. The reading with this step by Apple is that that era may be over: if AI models are updated every quarter and the difference between the best and the second is indistinguishable for 95% of users, what sense does it make to spend 50,000 kilos on research to go behind? It sounds sexier, especially to investors, to be the one who charges a toll for each interaction. And for that you don’t need the best model, you need the device that people have in their pockets. That’s the bet: Siri will continue to work, being owned by Apple and running on Apple hardware, but the piece that changes is the intelligence, the LLM. The most expensive piece to develop and the one that possibly provides the least differentiation when you have a billion iPhones. Apple does not give up something that matters to it at all, but rather outsources the part in which it cannot compete. Bittersweet for the company, bitter for its devotees, reasonable for its investors. The real deal is not in what Apple pays, but in what it gets. Google pays 20 billion a year for being the default search engine in Safari, and now sells (or delivers, the terms of the agreement have not been made public) the Apple Intelligence feed. But Apple not only charges, it also receive data on how 1 billion users interact with AI in mobile context: You know what they’re asking. When. How they formulate queries. What do they reject? What do they repeat? Google gets better distribution, and Apple gets tremendously valuable training. If having the best AI is no longer a competitive advantage, what is? OpenAI has the best product. Anthropic has the best technology. Google has the best infrastructure. But Apple has the iPhone. And in a world where AI is gone commoditizingin which one model is valid until the next one arrives three months later, the only moat What holds is the device. There is not so much need to innovate if you control access. You just need what comes through your door to be good enough. AND Gemini is fantastic. Therein lies the problem. In the age of AI, whoever controls the device can live off income by letting others innovate. What incentive does Apple have to really improve AI? As long as Gemini works well on iPhones, Apple won’t care if there are models that are 12% better. Their business is collecting the toll, not pushing the border. Innovation still exists and Google / OpenAI / Anthropic / xAI will continue to compete, but Now it is made by companies that do not capture all of its value while it is exploited by those who do not create it.. Welcome to digital rentism. Where the one who controls the door decides how much those who pass through it should improve. AND “Sufficient” always beats “exceptional” when the decider does not pay for the difference. Apple did the rationally right thing. And that, precisely, should scare us. In Xataka | Alphabet has just overtaken Apple in the ranking of the most valuable companies in the world. The reason is in AI Featured image | Rubaitul Azad, Dennis Brendel

unfold the most wicked dark pattern we have ever seen

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

In 2018 there was a service that was successful in the United States and that we were dying to try. It was called MoviePass and was known as ‘the Netflix of movie theaters’. Its operation was simple: you paid 10 dollars a month and you could go to the movies as many times as you wanted. What sounds like a dream for any movie buff was actually a bottomless pit of losses, so the company launched a strategy to stop the bleeding. The problem is that it was a directly illegal strategy. a ruin. First of all, it is worth stopping at the MoviePass business model. For 10 dollars we could see as many movies as we wanted per month, the problem is that the company did not have any type of agreement with movie theaters and in 2017 a ticket cost 12 dollars. That is, they lost 2 dollars a month per user as long as they only went to see a movie. The only way they could generate profits was if their users didn’t watch any movies a month and that’s where their CEO’s brilliant idea came from. Dark patterns. Are quite tricky design strategies so that it costs us more to cancel an account or encourage us to make a purchase, but MoviePass is another level. They counted on Business Insider in 2019that the company’s CEO Mitch Lowe gave the order to deliberately change the passwords of a group of very active users, thus preventing them from accessing their account and purchasing tickets. Furthermore, he did it just when ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ was released. reset password. You may be thinking that if they change your password, you reset it and that’s it. It wasn’t that easy. When users tried to recover their accounts, the process failed and it was no coincidence. Bloomberg published fragments of the formal complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FCT), which details that the company knew that the process would fail on most smartphones and nothing was done to prevent it. Faced with this situation, many users contacted customer service, but it usually took weeks for them to respond (that is, if they responded). There are quite a few threads on reddit with users suffering from this situation. Unscrupulous. The details of how it was carried out are absolutely crazy. They called it the “password breakpoint program” and it was the topic of several meetings and emails, as if it were any other business topic. Furthermore, to avoid possible action by the FCT, they decided that they would only block the accounts of 2% of their most active users (about 75,000) and that the excuse would be that they had detected “suspicious activity or possible fraud.” They also monitored the success of their program: a week later only half of those affected had managed to reset their password. Consequences. The FCT ended up discovering the cake so it is logical to think that MoviePass had to pay a million-dollar fine. Well no. MoviePass admitted the facts and reached an agreement in which they promised not to repeat it (as if they were trustworthy). The reason is that a court ruling prevented the FCT from imposing fines in such cases. The company did not survive its terrible business model and In 2019 it closed its doors. In 2020, the parent company filed for bankruptcy. In the end they couldn’t repeat it. Image | MoviePass, Daniel Dalea in Unsplash In Xataka | The first fine against “dark employers” in Spain is already here (and it will not be the last)

These are the best technology deals we have found today on Amazon, January 15

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

We are almost approaching the halfway point of January, a time when many stores more than activate their sales and where it is possible to find good prices on almost everything you are looking for. If you are thinking of buying technology, these are some of the best bargains that we found today, January 13, in amazon. smartphone Xiaomi Poco M8 Pro 5G by 359.90 euros: 6.83 inches and 512 GB. Notebook computer HP 15-fc0239ns by 499 euros: 15.6 inches and FreeDOS. WiFi Mesh System TP-Link Deco X1500 by 119.99 euros: with WiFi 6 and up to 1,500 Mbps. Wireless headphones Sony WF-C510 by 29.74 euros: with IPX4 protection and battery life of up to 22 hours. Smart TV TCL 55V6C by 288.43 euros: 55 inches and with Google TV. Xiaomi Poco M8 Pro 5G Smartphone If there is something that Xiaomi’s Poco family is characterized by, it is by offering very good terminals at a reduced price. Now, on Amazon, you can get this Xiaomi Poco M8 Pro 5G with a 10% discountsince it is available for 359.90 euros. This Xiaomi Poco M8 Pro 5G has a 6.83-inch CrystalRes display and 1.5K resolution. Its main camera is 50 MP Light Fusion 800. The brain of this smartphone is the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor, accompanied by a RAM 12 GB and 512 GB of internal storage. It also highlights its 6,500 mAh battery and supports 100 W HyperCharge charging. XIAOMI POCO M8 Pro 5G – 12+512GB Smartphone The price could vary. We earn commission from these links HP 15-fc0239ns Laptop Yes, by 2026, you are looking for a portable good, nice and cheap for working or studying, this HP is a good option, and even more so now that it is on sale on Amazon. It has applied a 25% discount and now you can buy it for 499 euros. This laptop from HP has a 15.6 screen inches with Full HD resolution. It has an AMD Ryzen 7-7730U processor, accompanied by 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD storage. It’s a laptop FreeDOS (without reinstalled operating system) and has a Qwerty keyboard. HP 15-fc0239ns – 15.6″ FHD Laptop The price could vary. We earn commission from these links TP-Link Deco X1500 Mesh WiFi System Nowadays, it is necessary to have a good Internet connection at all times at home. If you suffer microcuts in your home, this TP-Link Deco X1500 Mesh WiFi system It is a must. Before it cost around 170 euros, but now you can get it reduced by 119.99 euros. This WiFi Mesh system from TP-Link offers connections Wi-Fi 6 with speeds up to 1,500 Mbps. Thanks to OFDMA and MU-MIMO technologies you can connect many more devices. With this system you can create a unified network and it also stands out for offering robust parental controls. (New) TP-Link Deco X1500 (3-Pack) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Sony WF-C510 Wireless Headphones Available in four different colors, these Bluetooth headphones from Sony are a real bargain today on Amazon. Now they have applied a 50% discount and you can buy them for 29.74 euros. His battery lasts up to 11 hours with a single charge, which can be doubled with the charging case. It has IPX4 protection against water and incorporate an ambient sound mode. They are compatible with Spotify Tap and can connect with Android, iOS, PC and Mac devices. Sony WF-C510 Wireless Headphones The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Smart TV TCL 55V6C We already mentioned this TV last week because of its low price, but this week it is even much cheaper. Its recommended RRP is 449 euros, but now you can get it with a 36% discountby 288.43 euros. This is a TV cheap from the TCL firm. It mounts a 55-inch diagonal Direct LED panel with 4K HDR resolution. Works under the operating system Google TV and is compatible with Dolby Vision & Atmos. In addition, it stands out for being compatible with Google Assistant and Alexa. TCL 55V6C 55″ Direct LED Smart TV The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Freepik, HP, TCL, Sony, TP-Link and Xiaomi In Xataka | The best mobile phones, we have tested them and here are their analyzes In Xataka | Best sound bars in quality price (2026). Which one to buy and seven recommended models from 99 euros

In Tres Cantos they are analyzing the DNA of uncollected dog poop and fining the owners

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

The landscape, the species of trees, the flowers in the flowerbeds, the design of the paths or the games for children may vary, but in the parks of Spain (and many other countries) there are certain “basics” that are not usually missing: there are benches, there are fountains… and there is dog poopan annoying reminder that citizens do not always comply with the obligations that come with having pets. In recent years some city councils have tried to solve it creating DNA bases that allow them to locate the owners of the dogs and punish them if they do not take care of their feces. For a while, receiving one of those fines sounded like a distant threat, but in Spain there are already town councils passing from theory to practice. The last example Tres Cantos leaves it, in Madrid. What has happened? That the Tres Cantos City Council said goodbye to 2025 by activating its machinery to fine people who breaks its regulations. So far nothing out of the ordinary. The curious thing is the offense that is being pursued and above all how the City Council hunts down the offenders. What it has done is use the “canine DNA detection service” to fine those neighbors who ignore the excrement that their pets leave on sidewalks, parks and gardens. The ordinance makes it clear that people who walk pets through the municipality must collect “immediately” (and throw in the trash) the poop they leave in any area where pedestrians pass. Failure to do so is considered an infraction that, according to TeleMadrid specifiescarries fines of several hundred euros: between 300 and 600, depending on whether or not the offender is a repeat offender. Is it something new? Tres Cantos announced a year and a half ago his intention to create a “canine genetic census” to have the municipality’s dogs ‘registered’ and thus be able to identify excrement abandoned in the streets. In 2024 even launched a campaign baptized ‘I’m from Tres Cantos, it’s in my DNA’ in which it asked neighbors to register their pets in the following months. The idea was that people would take their animals to an authorized clinic to perform a simple test (basically taking a saliva sample) that would allow them to be registered. The procedure costs about 40 eurosbut the Consistory recalled that it is mandatory. Failure to do so also carries a penalty. The measure did not remain on paper and throughout the last few months the City Council has intensified their efforts to put it into practice, even with collection days of excrement. The surprise (and this is new) came on December 30, when the local government advertisement that the canine DNA system has already allowed him to identify “several owners” of dogs who do not pick up their pets’ feces. And he warned: “He will be punished” But… Is it that important? Yes it is. And not only because the measure wants to once and for all solve the problem of dog poop in cities. As remember from Tres Cantosthe canine registry is obtained in a “simple and harmless” way for the animal and serves many more purposes than sanctioning. “The genetic census is a reliable tool that protects animals, since it allows them to be located if they are lost, mistreated or abandoned, providing scientific certainty in possible judicial processes, claims and complaints,” claimed in July 2024 the Councilor for Public Health. In fact, the canine genetic census has already helped to resolve cases of puppy abandonment. Does it only happen in Tres Cantos? No. The idea of canine DNA censuses has permeated more municipalities in Spain. In December 2024, Pipper on Tour estimated that 81 locations They already require pet owners to take them to clinics to have blood or saliva samples taken to carry out a census. In recent years the idea has attracted municipalities such as Malaga, Collado Villalba, Santa Eularia, Cornellà either Alcala de Henaresamong others. The latter in fact has a “canine CSI” for offenders who risk fines of between 300 and 3,000 euros. In its first year the program made it possible about 200 disciplinary proceedings, although many were directed at owners who still did not register their pets. In July Santa Eulària celebrated also that canine DNA has reduced fecal alerts by half. Images | Bruce Warrington (Unsplash) and Monika Simeonova (Unsplash) In Xataka | Rats are growing by 300% in some cities around the world. And the problem is that we have no idea how to avoid it.

The United States knows that Venezuela’s subsoil is full of rare earths. The big problem is that he doesn’t know where

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

The announcement that American companies could access to Venezuela’s vast oil has reignited a much broader ambition of Donald Trump’s administration. Because the Latin American nation has something that Washington desperately seeks, something that China he has plenty. He crux It’s how and how much. Beyond crude oil. Yes, the “b” side of the North American “landing” in Venezuela also seeks to explore the mineral potential of the country as part of “the national security of the United States.” The experts they point out that, in addition to crude oil, there would be unverified reserves of critical minerals and possible large quantities of rare earths, key inputs for defense and technology. However, the lack of reliable data, doubts about economic viability and operational risks in areas with the presence of armed groups and mining illegality turn the objective into an enterprise. much more complex that the oil reopening itself, with significant environmental impacts associates to energy-intensive mining. The supply chain and the bottleneck. Even if the extraction obstacles were overcome, the decisive challenge appears in processing. The refining of rare earths is concentrated in more than 90% in Chinaa domain constructed for decades through subsidies, industrial expansion and lax environmental regulations. This position has made rare earths a sensitive point of trade tensions between Washington and Beijing, with export controls that have highlighted the fragility of American supply chains. The consensus among analysts is that this industrial and geopolitical advantage cannot be reversed quickly, so new deposits without their own refining capacity would contribute little to short-term strategic resilience. Why it is important. It we have counted other times. The classification of “critical minerals” covers a broad set of raw materials essential for the economy and security, from aluminum and copper to a specific group of 17 elements known as rare earths, essential for high-performance magnets, advanced electronics and military systems. Although these elements are not scarce in the Earth’s crust, their extraction and refining are technically demanding and expensive. In the United States there are efforts to develop domestic capabilities, but start-up times are often measured in years or decades, which explains the temptation to look for external solutions that, in practice, rarely offer immediate results. Geological potential and structural limits. It happens that, unlike other countries with confirmed reserves, Venezuela does not appear in international lists as a relevant producer of rare earths, an explained absence for decades of opacity institutional during the governments by Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro. Still, the country is believed to host deposits of coltan and bauxitesources of metals considered critical such as tantalum, niobium, aluminum and gallium. Projects like the Orinoco Mining Arc They sought to capitalize on that potential, but have been marked by illicit mining, lack of investment, a shortage of qualified labor, and a volatile regulatory environment that discourages international operators. A strategic mirage in the medium term. If you like, the final evaluation of the experts is clear: although the Venezuelan subsoil may hide valuable resources, its contribution to the security of supply of the United States it would be marginal on the near horizon. Without solid geological data, without security guarantees and without processing capacity independent of the Chinese circuit, Venezuela’s mineral interest seems more an extension of the geopolitical pulse than a practical solution, at least in the short term. In that context, the American bet faces a paradox: the country offers a lot on paper, but little that can be translated into real advantages over the next decade. Image | Mauricio CampelloRawPixel In Xataka | The US did not need to shoot to enter Caracas. All it took was an invisible weapon and unexpected “help” from Russia In Xataka | While the whole world looks at oil, Venezuela’s true treasure is hidden in the basements of London: its gold

the world’s first system to measure time on the Moon

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

The Moon is close to going from being an occasional destination to a place where many things happen at the same time, and that forces us to rethink even the most basic bases of how we operate there. When several ships are maneuvering, when you want to land accurately or when thinking about a future navigation network, it is no longer enough to use Earth time and make corrections on the fly. Time becomes an operational tool, and any gap, no matter how small, begins to matter. That is the background of the step that China has just taken. The announcement comes from Nanjing and has a very practical objective. According to Global Timesa team at Purple Mountain Observatory has developed and published LTE440a software that allows you to directly compare the weather on the Moon with that on Earth without resorting to manual calculations. The system is based on a model that integrates lunar gravity and the movement of the satellite, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences presented it officially as a usable product last December, not just as an academic exercise, with an eye toward future operations in the lunar environment. Why time doesn’t run the same on the Moon. The gap that Chinese software is trying to solve is not a curiosity, but a direct consequence of physics. By having a lower gravity, the Moon makes its clocksand move forward about 56 microseconds a day with respect to those on Earth. This difference, imperceptible in the short term, accumulates and ends up introducing increasing errors if Earth time continues to be used as the only reference for missions that last months or even years. Landings and navigation at play. This gap, however small it may seem, has direct consequences when moving from theory to operation. Jonathan McDowellHarvard astronomer and quoted by the South China Morning Postexplained that differences of just one microsecond can become relevant in navigation systems, affecting calculations even on scales of one minute. What is LTE440. LTE440 calculates the relationship between the Moon’s coordinate time and the dynamic time of the solar system’s barycenter, an astronomical reference used to describe the motion of bodies. This correspondence is one of the necessary steps to later convert lunar time to Earth time in a traceable way. A model of the “Long March 10”, the launch system that China wants to use for its first manned mission to the Moon The international framework. The pressure to sort out this problem does not come only from China. In 2024, the International Astronomical Union adopted a broad framework for the Moon to have its own temporal reference, given the prospect of multiple missions operating at the same time. In that context, the Nanjing team’s work is presented as an engineering step that attempts to turn that general idea into a usable tool. Ambitious scope. The scientific article in Astronomy and Astrophysics maintains that The method remains on the order of a few tens of nanoseconds even according to their calculations when projected out to 1,000 years. On the other hand, this technical advance comes at a very specific moment in the Chinese space program. China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) maintains its goal to take astronauts to the Moon by 2030 and has already completed preliminary prototyping of the main systems, from the Long March-10 rocket to the Mengzhou spacecraft and the Lanyue lunar module. Images | Ganapathy Kumar | engin akyurt In Xataka | Poland and Spain are the European countries that have increased their contribution to space the most. For very different reasons

The SPARC fusion reactor is the “microchip” of the future for AI

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

The “30 years to merger” joke is officially dead in Massachusetts. With the installation of the first high-temperature superconducting magnet in the SPARC reactor, the era of experimentation has given way to the era of manufacturing. With a calendar marking 2027 as the year of the ‘First Plasma’, humanity is just months away from proving that the Sun can be bottled commercially. The rebirth in the desert. The epicenter of this change is the alliance between Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), chip giant Nvidia and industrial powerhouse Siemens at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. As detailed by the agenciesthe three companies have joined forces to create a “digital twin” of SPARC, the demonstration reactor CFS is building outside Boston. This announcement is not just a declaration of intent. As Seeking Alpha reportsCFS has already installed the first of 18 high-temperature superconducting magnets that form the heart of SPARC. According to CFS CEO Bob Mumgaard, in statements to Fortune: “These magnets are powerful enough to lift an aircraft carrier out of the water.” The paradox of AI. As Siemens CEO Roland Busch warned, on the CES stageAI factories and data centers require constant gigawatts of electricity to operate, but AI is, in turn, the tool that will provide that energy. Check a plasma at 100 million degrees Celsius It is an engineering challenge that the human mind cannot solve alone. As Latitude Media explainsthe collaboration with Nvidia makes it possible to compress “years of manual experimentation into just weeks of virtual optimization.” The Digital “Brain” of Fusion. The key to CFS achieving what no one has been able to do in decades lies in an unprecedented digital infrastructure. The company isn’t just welding steel; He is building the reactor twice: once in the real world and once in the virtual one. To do this, it uses the Siemens Xcelerator ecosystem in industrial design and Nvidia’s Omniverse platform to give life to an exact replica of the SPARC reactor. This system works as a sophisticated flight simulator. Bob Mumgaard, CEO of CFS, details what they use an aerial analogy to explain this technological hierarchy; While the digital twin developed with Nvidia acts as the “virtual plane”, Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence functions as the “co-pilot” that helps navigate the plasma turbulence. This strategy allows you to say “goodbye to guesswork.” As Del Costy states, Siemens executive, “the data doesn’t lie.” The real value of this collaboration is the ability to run thousands of virtual scenarios before moving a single magnet in the physical plant. This technology is what allows engineers to observe in real time what happens inside the magnetic “doughnut” (the tokamak) without having to open the machinery, eliminating the uncertainty that has held back the industry for half a century. The political board. So far, the merger is one of the few issues that enjoys bipartisan support in the United States. However, a new player has shaken the board: Trump Media & Technology Group. According to World Nuclear NewsPresident Donald Trump’s company has merged with TAE Technologies in a $6 billion deal. The goal is to create the first publicly traded fusion energy player to ensure America’s “energy and AI supremacy.” Although CFS and TAE use different technologies – CFS relies on the tokamak and superconducting magnets, while TAE uses particle accelerators and hydrogen and boron fuel – the competition to be the first to inject electricity into the grid is total. CFS also looks askance to Helion, the startup backed by Sam Altman (OpenAI), which you already have a contract to supply power to Microsoft. The horizon. The roadmap presented by CFS, supported by capital from Bill Gates and Mitsubishiseems for the first time tangible: Late 2026: End of SPARC construction in Massachusetts. It will be the time when the “virtual airplane” designed by Nvidia and Siemens fully materializes in the physical world. 2027: The moment of the “First Plasma”. SPARC must turn on its magnetic heart to produce its first plasma and scientifically demonstrate “Q greater than 1”: generating more energy than it consumes. Early 2030s: ARC debuts in Virginia. A 400 megawatt commercial plant capable of supplying 300,000 homes with clean energy literally extracted from hydrogen particles present in water. The end of the “30 years” joke For decades, the scientific community joked that fusion was always 30 years away. But with the backing of Nvidia and Google, the merger has ceased to be a laboratory project and has become a manufacturing industry. “Lego” is complicated, but with instructions from AI and capital from tech giants, the Sun is closer than ever to being bottled up on Earth. Image | CFS Xataka | Russia wants to be the one who turns on the light on the Moon: its plan involves an operational nuclear reactor before 2036

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, is building a huge space telescope. The question is not how, but why

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

If someone today wanted to build something like a new Hubble, it would make sense to think of years of reports, reviews and committees before the first piece of hardware is even manufactured. However, that logic has just been broken with an unexpected announcement: Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and his wife Wendy have put on the table his own money to power not one, but four telescopes, including a large-scale space observatory. The move not only challenges the sector’s inertia, but raises a question deeper than budget or technology: what exactly is a former Silicon Valley executive pursuing by wading into the heart of modern astronomy. This is a project promoted by the Schmidt Observatory System, it seeks to cover everything from the deep sky to the detailed study of transient phenomena. A change of model. Currently, telescopes are generally in the hands of public agencies and academic consortia. Building ever-larger mirrors and then putting instruments into orbit turned astronomy into a matter of national budgets. The Schmidts’ entry into this arena suggests that, with new technologies and another way to finance risk, that historic balance could be starting to shift again. Risk, speed and open science. The approach behind the observatory system is not to compete with space agencies, but to cover the space left by their own processes, which are long, conservative and highly conditioned by public budgets. The Schmidts seek to finance concepts that have already been imagined by the scientific community, but that rarely overcome the barrier of official financing due to their level of risk or the deadlines they require. The piece that gives meaning to the whole and that really makes the difference is Lazulithe only one of the four projects that will leave Earth. It aims to cover a wide range of science, from transient events lasting minutes or hours to the detailed study of exoplanets, with a level of flexibility that large public observatories cannot always offer. Further, more agile. One of the clearest breaks between Lazuli and Hubble is where it will operate and how. While NASA’s telescope orbits about 500 kilometers from Earth, Lazuli will be placed much further away, in an elliptical orbit that should give it a clearer view and allow for fast and continuous data linking. Lazuli Space Observatory In the official description, Schmidt Sciences frames this operation in a “lunar-resonant” orbit. Added to this is a larger mirror, 3.1 meters compared to Hubble’s 2.4 meters, and an observation philosophy designed to react quickly to unexpected phenomena. One platform, several instruments. Lazuli is designed as a unique platform that integrates three instruments designed to cover everything from wide-field observations to the detailed study of exoplanets and transient phenomena. Wide-field optical imager with high cadence for photometric time series, 30′×15′ field of view and filters between 300 and 1000 nm Integral field spectrograph continuously covering 400–1700 nm, optimized for stable spectrophotometry and rapid sorting High contrast coronagraph to directly observe exoplanets and circumstellar environments, with contrasts of 10⁻⁸ and up to 10⁻⁹ after processing The era of array telescopes. Argus, DSA and LFAST They are not traditional telescopes, but rather distributed systems that take advantage of recent advances in computing, storage, and automated analysis. Instead of concentrating everything in a single structure, they distribute the collection of light or radio signals among tens or thousands of modules that are then digitally synchronized. This modularity aims to accelerate deployments and opens the door to observing the sky almost in real time, something fundamental for the astronomy of fleeting events. Render of the Argus Array (left), Deep Synoptic Array (right) Argus Array will bring together 1,200 optical telescopes in Texas to observe the northern sky almost continuously, with the idea of being able to “rewind” what happened minutes or hours before an event such as a supernova. DSA, in Nevada and under the direction of Caltech, will deploy 1,600 radio antennas to map more than a billion sources and update its view of the sky every fifteen minutes. LFAST, for its part, will be installed in Arizona as a system of 20 80-centimeter mirrors aimed at large-aperture spectroscopy and the search for biosignatures, with a prototype planned for mid-2026. What the Schmidts have launched is, at its core, an experiment on the scientific system itself. Lazuli and his three colleagues on land aim to show that it is possible to build large-scale observatories more quickly and with an openness of data that does not always fit into traditional models. Whether that vision materializes will depend on factors yet to be determined, such as the final contractors, real costs or the feasibility of the schedules, but if it goes well, the impact will not only be measured in new discoveries, but in a new way of deciding what science is done. Images | Village Global | Schmidt Observatory System In Xataka | China has just resolved one of the biggest doubts about going to Mars with the birth of six space mice

A YouTube video that lasts 140 years has gone viral. Nobody is clear why

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

A YouTube video which, on paper, would not end for more than a century is the type of oddity that the internet knows how to turn into a phenomenon. It is enough to see an impossible figure in duration and verify that that same clip exceeds 2.3 million views to understand why half the world has stopped to watch it. Not because someone intends to reproduce it in its entirety, but because something like this challenges what we think we know about how the platform works. Even more so when it comes from a strange channel, with only three published videos and 137,000 subscribers. The longest video on YouTube? What has triggered the confusion is not only that exorbitant figure, but the way in which YouTube shows it depending on where you look. A counter appears in the channel view and in the video thumbnail that, translated into real time, is equivalent to about 140 years of continuous playback, as we can see in the screenshots. However, when you press play and load the player, the duration changes and is around 12 hours, with variations of minutes and seconds. The length of the video when embedded in a web page The limits of the platform. On your own help pagesGoogle explains that the maximum upload is 256 GB or 12 hours, whichever comes first, and remembers that these limits have varied over the years, leaving longer videos from previous times on the platform. This framework is essential to not get carried away by the impact of the number that appears on the screen. If the player shows something close to 12 hours, it’s within what YouTube considers normal, while a duration of decades simply doesn’t fit with the service’s known rules. The only direct source of this entire case is the file of the channel that hosts the video. On YouTube he appears as @shinywrand in your profile YouTube indicates as location “North Korea”. It also shows minimal but striking activity: three videos published, 137,000 subscribers and 2,551,606 accumulated views, with the channel’s registration date on July 31, 2023. There is no additional information or descriptions that clarify what it is or where it comes from, beyond what the platform itself shows. A metadata failure. The hypothesis that best fits what we see is that we are not dealing with a real duration, but rather a number that is poorly recorded or poorly read within the YouTube infrastructure. Each video has several time measurements associated with it, the one declared by the original file, the one calculated by the system when processing it and the one used by the different interface modules. If one of them fails, inconsistencies could appear as striking as a preview that points to decades of playback and a player that moves in a normal range. The threshold of direct. Google explains that Live shows of less than 12 hours are automatically archived, but if they exceed that time they may be lost, a detail that helps to understand why that number appears again and again as a border. Although there is no confirmation that this video comes from a glitch in a live broadcast, that technical framework adds context to the duration displayed by the player. The result is a phenomenon that lives on the border between what the platform teaches and what really happens in its internal functioning. There is a video with an impossible length, a player that tells another story and a channel that provides no clues other than its own figures. And while the reasons remain unclear, the video continues to gain views and more than 30,000 comments. Images | BoliviaIntelligent | Screenshot In Xataka | Before, advertising was to monetize. Now it is to punish you and YouTube has taken it to the extreme

invest a million in an infrastructure that has been ruined for decades

January 13, 2026 by usatoday24

The capture of Nicolás Maduro by US forces has left to Donald Trump’s administration as de facto “guardian” of the richest oil sector —and at the same time more punished. In this new geopolitical board, Repsol CEO Josu Jon Imaz was selected to participate in a key meeting in the East Room of the White House along with other oil giants. According to BloombergRepsol is now seeking urgent licenses to resume the export of crude oil, an activity that was frozen after the trade embargo of March 2025. The slogan so that Repsol can fulfill its strategic plan and take its business to the stock market upstream (exploration and production) on Wall Street, needs its Venezuelan assets to stop being a risk accounting entry and become real barrels. Resuscitate a “broken” industry. During the meeting, Trump has asked the oil companies a joint investment of 100 billion dollars to revive an obsolete industry. But the infrastructure it’s so deteriorated that the state-owned PDVSA has gone so far as to dismantle oil pipelines to sell the metal as scrap. Even so, as RTVE has explainedRepsol has promised to triple its production, going from 45,000 to 135,000 barrels per day within three years. titanic challenge. Venezuelan crude oil is “extra heavy”, thick as tarand arrives at the refineries “dirty”, loaded with salt and metals. Only companies with historical roots such as Repsol (present in the country since 1993) have the know-how to process this “heavy food.” But the problem is not just oil. 90% of what Repsol produces in the La Perla field It’s natural gasa resource that powers 33% of Venezuela’s electricity supply. Without Repsol gas, the country goes out; But for this gas to be profitable and exportable, the company needs to build liquefaction plants that simply do not exist today. “Pragmatism in the face of the Trump environment”. To facilitate the disembarkation, Washington has declared a “national emergency” that allows the US Treasury to shield Venezuelan oil revenues in US accounts. This measure, qualified by Expansion like an unprecedented movementseeks to prevent funds from being confiscated by the thousands of creditors waiting at the door, offering the “total security” that Trump promised executives. While Repsol declares itself “ready to invest strongly,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods threw a cold bucket of water on the White House itself. According to the Financial TimesWoods affirmed that Venezuela remains “uninvestable” without drastic changes in the legal framework and recalled that its assets were confiscated twice in the past. On the horizon. Repsol walks through a financial minefield. Still carries a property debt of 330 million euros from PDVSA. Furthermore, Financial Times warns that competitors like Chevron have an advantage due to their close personal relationship with Trump and for having maintained constant operations under special licenses during the years of the embargo. Added to this is the warning from analyst Ron Bousso in Reuters: Trump has suggested that companies should “forget” past debts to start on a “level playing field.” For Repsol, this could mean definitively giving up collecting what was lost under Chavismo in exchange for maintaining its future exploitation rights. A final bet. The company must decide whether to bury billions in rebuilding fossil infrastructure in a world clamoring for the energy transition. The “hole” of 1,160 million euros in Spain’s trade deficit with Venezuela It is just the symptom of a dangerous dependency. Venezuela is still the largest gas station in the world, but today it is a facility in ruins. Repsol’s success will no longer depend only on its technical expertise in the Quiriquire or La Perla fields, but on its ability to dance to the rhythm set by Washington in a reconstruction that, according to expertscould take decades to complete. Image | Repsol Xataka | Getting hold of Venezuela’s immense oil reserves seems like a “bargain.” It’s actually an engineering nightmare.

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